


мышка

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: 1960s-era, Animal Death, Gen, WWII memories, canon-typical mention of drug use, mention of spousal death, pests, rodents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21656605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: Varvara Sidorovna dealt with a mouse in the kitchen of her house in Wimbledon.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 46
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	мышка

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hamsterwoman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamsterwoman/gifts).



> One of the anecdotes in this story, along with the title, is from the usual suspect. Thank you, as always.
> 
> Some of the content of this story is based on anecdotes from Svetlana Alexievitch’s “The Unwomanly Face of War” (another thank-you to the usual suspect for the recommendation of this book, a very long time ago but in this galaxy). I’ve also liberally borrowed given names from it, on the doctrine that by definition a name appearing in the book is period-correct.
> 
> For the mice that were (are, probably) in my kitchen this past semester.

There was a mouse in the pantry.

Before her husband had died, Varvara would have felt the need to pretend to be afraid of it, but she also hadn’t told her side of the war to anyone, not ever. Now, she regarded the hole chewed in the sack of flour, and felt resignation.

Anya had had such stories of mice in her upbringing – apartments full of mice, nests and piss in your clothes, little feet running across your body while you tried to sleep. The mice in Varvara’s quaint little home in England were not going to become so bold or so numerous. This was neither a shithole nor the old country.

Later, she would live in a shithole in London and not care when a mouse ran over her toes, and laugh at this memory, but she would also be high at the time and under the influence of quite a lot of rock music. But this was several years before that, and she still thought the magic was going out of the world, as the years were running out of her life. As the years had already gone out for her husband. So she minded the mouse.

She put out a handful of mousetraps baited with cheese, to no avail. Apparently this was a _clever_ mouse, and could filch the cheese off without setting the traps off. She tried baiting the traps with flour, just to see, but that had even less effect, as the mouse ignored it. Poison was equally useless.

After two weeks, she considered getting a cat, but that seemed rather permanent, and she didn’t much care for animals.

Over the following week, the mouse got into her butter. It chewed on her candles. It ate the dried beans in her pantry and made a little cache of rice in her couch.

One night, when she came out of her bedroom to check on the suspicious rustling noises, it jumped half a metre to get of her garbage can and began skittering away.

She watched it go, her pulse pounding in her chest and her breathing rapid. Then she went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror at herself: the greying hair mussed from tossing and turning in bed, trying to hear the mouse creeping in her kitchen. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the turned-down curve of her mouth. She smiled at herself. It looked like someone trying to draw a wicked witch luring a child into her hut, but she _was_ a witch. It was time to start acting like one.

In the morning.

She went to bed, and slept despite the sound of rustling in her garbage.

She’d learnt a fifth-order shield spell back during the war. It didn’t work very well: it didn’t stop bullets, other spells, grenades, or anything else you actually encountered in combat. It stopped people punching you if you got it up in time, but that was about it. She suspected, based on what had happened to Manya, that it didn’t stop bayonets. But these all moved fast and had a lot of force behind them. She doubted a mouse could travel that fast, but the spell required attention to keep going.

She opened up her cabinets one at a time, emptied them, and checked for mouse holes. There were several holes that she hadn’t noticed previously, so she filled them in. What she needed was to reduce the number of paths the mouse could take easily, and then guard that one. She wasn’t guaranteed to catch the mouse this way, but it upped the odds. She could always escalate.

She called in her neighbor’s husband and using a hand truck, they lifted her cooker out of the way. She filled in those holes, and called him back to have it moved back into place. She did the same with her refrigerator, her counter full of sweating food and ice cream as she filled in holes in the walls.

She left one hole. It was under the counter, in a place where the baseboard and the cabinet itself didn’t quite meet, large enough for a mouse to creep through. She left a piece of soft cheese for it as temptation, and sat at her kitchen table, with a nice long interesting book and a good view of the remaining hole, and waited. She thought quiet mouse thoughts.

Some eternity later, its little head and nose poked out of the hole. She pretended to ignore this and turned a page in her book. The mouse skittered out, ignored the cheese, and went under the stove.

Small thumps emerged from under the stove. The mouse returned, apparently thwarted. It bit into the cheese and started dragging it away.

Varvara cast all six orders of her adapted shield spell, creating a dome around the mouse, and the mouse went rigid. She slid a piece of cardboard underneath, and picked up shield, cheese, and panicked mouse, then dumped the lot into a metal pot. She left the shield up, since she’d have to release it to put the lid on. Then again, she didn’t want the mouse to suffocate.

Through the blur of the shield, she regarded the frantically running mouse. Then, concentrating, she flattened the shield and put the lid on top.

The sound of little claws on steel petered out.

“What shall I do with you?” she said, then picked up the entire assemblage and took it into the back garden.

The garden was scraggly with late fall. She took the lid off the pot and inverted everything, including the spell, onto the ground. She released the shield and nudged the pot a little deeper into the ground to keep the mouse from escaping, then took a step back.

The iceball flickered sadly as she fired it. Very sloppy work. Well, if there were more of them, which there almost certainly were, she’d get back into form.

The pot was rimed with frost, so she used her sleeve to shield her hand when she picked it up. Her palm and fingertips tingled with the cold.


End file.
